Winter Palace

A practical note before anything else: since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, St Petersburg has been effectively closed to Western visitors. International flights are severely restricted, Western credit cards no longer function, and most Western governments advise against travel to Russia. This post documents the Winter Palace and Hermitage as they are, for when travel conditions change. The collection has not moved and the buildings are intact.

The Winter Palace and the Hermitage

The Winter Palace is the building; the State Hermitage Museum is the institution that occupies it and five adjacent buildings: the Small Hermitage, the Old Hermitage, the New Hermitage, the Hermitage Theatre, and the General Staff Building across Palace Square. Roughly 3 million objects in total, about 60,000 on display. You cannot see all of them in a week and attempting a comprehensive visit is the surest way to leave feeling exhausted and inadequate.

The practical approach: choose two or three collections in advance. The Western European art (Rembrandt, Rubens, El Greco, Caravaggio, Matisse, Picasso) is in the New Hermitage and the Winter Palace first floor. The Impressionist and Post-Impressionist collection, acquired by the Shchukin and Morozov families before the Revolution and now among the finest in the world, is in the General Staff Building across the square. The Scythian gold is in the Gold Room, requiring a separate guided tour booking.

The Architecture

The Winter Palace was completed in 1762, designed by Bartolomeo Rastrelli in Russian Baroque for Empress Elizabeth. The turquoise, white, and gold exterior is only the beginning; the State Rooms inside include the Malachite Room with green malachite column facings and fireplace, the Pavilion Hall, and the Jordan Staircase. The accumulated labour and materials invested in these interiors represent a scale of expenditure that is genuinely hard to comprehend in marble and semi-precious stone per square metre.

The history is interwoven with Russian politics. The October 1917 Bolshevik seizure of the Winter Palace was subsequently reconstructed as propaganda film so many times that the film version became the standard historical image of the event. During the Siege of Leningrad (1941-1944), most of the collection was crated and sent to the Urals for safekeeping; the palace itself was badly damaged but survived.

Palace Square

The square in front of the Winter Palace is one of the grandest public spaces in Europe: palace on one side, the curved General Staff Building on two others, the Admiralty visible beyond. The Alexander Column at the centre, 47.5 metres of red Finnish granite topped by an angel, is the world’s tallest freestanding triumphal column. The square is accessible at all hours at no charge.

White Nights

St Petersburg sits at roughly the same latitude as southern Alaska. From mid-June through early July, the sun barely sets; at midnight it is dusk, at 3am the sky is already brightening. This is one of the more specifically extraordinary atmospheric experiences available in any major city, and the Mariinsky Theatre runs opera and ballet through the White Nights period. When access to Russia resumes, the White Nights period is the right time to visit.